Oh, country music didn’t necessarily start this way. Originally country music was written by men and women who barnstormed up from the electricity-free rural cowplots they were born in, and who alternated writing songs about drinking and fighting and fucking with songs about drinking while fucking, fucking while fighting, or about combinations of the three that happened while driving semi-trucks.

You know real country singers because they are either now all dead or semi-retarded from years of excessive alcohol and drug abuse. They did not have six-pack abs and did not manage their money. They died in fiery plane crashes and holding bottles of liquor; they clutched their hearts and fell to the ground when whole pieces of fatback clogged their arteries after years of eating vile road food. They were not pretty.

Their music was about life sucking, and oh wasn’t that a shame, so let’s just have a drink and forget about it. It was, on the whole, fundamentally honest music about life being hard for poor, violent, and uneducated people.

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Country music plays out now like some kind of long, dumbed-down daily affirmation set to a bland rock beat. You know it’s “country” because occasionally they lay a fiddle down across a verse or two, or reference things like “railroad tracks” or “barbecue,” or sing with obvious planted accents. Hey, Kenny Chesney just wants you to take it easy and relax! Like you were on an island! Not a coup-ish, violent island seething with poverty, but one a them ones where every thang’s okay, and you and your baby got a couple a Coronas and nothin’ to worry ’bout but your tans. HOO-WEEE!!!

That’s one of our favorite things to loathe about country music–the demographic whores who run Nashville have this list of things to sandwich into every song. Hey, people like Buffett? Let’s have lots of songs about how great the beach is! People will love that. Hey, a song about how your hometown is just dandy! And your children and wife are awesome! And everything you’re doin’ is right and good, man.

We would kill someone for a good song about spooky rural murder. In fact, we offer to commit one, just to have a talented songwriter witness it, and then compose a badass song about it. Toby Keith will be on one side, and we’ll be on the other with an RPG. You and your Ford Truck and your shitty goatee, which you wear as the totem against obesity like every other hilljack concerned about their double chin and masculinity, will go up in flames. HOW D’YA LIKE ME NOW? That you’re on fire.

To hell with the state for ruining a fine art form and for becoming the landing pad for spent hair-band rockers desperate to sell their second-rate midlife efforts to an audience with lower standards–namely, country music fans. (See: Bon Jovi. Who says you can’t go home? Oh, only about half the population of New Orleans.)

It's so true. Give me a song about reality. About losing your house, about getting your job shipped overseas, about the pain of having your baby daddy run off on you, about realizing your friend is a racist, about having to buy some crap from China from the company you used to work for, about losing a loved one in a drunk driving accident...
The money has gotten too big for the big-time singers and writers to relate to the audiences they perform for. They all have stylists now, they have trainers and private chefs. And for all the crap the Hollywood left gets, I don't see too many country singers delivering food to Africa or Haiti or doing missions for UNICEF. There are a few who still bring the goods, Trisha Yearwood, Vince Gill, Brad Paisley, but most are only kidding themselves.

Brad Paisley is the man. Talented as fuck, both as a singer and a guitarist, can handle a tender ballad or an uptempo song with appropriate amounts of intensity, and isn't afraid to laugh, especially at himself.

Brad Paisley is the man. Talented as fuck, both as a singer and a guitarist, can handle a tender ballad or an uptempo song with appropriate amounts of intensity, and isn't afraid to laugh, especially at himself.

Brad Paisley is the man. Talented as fuck, both as a singer and a guitarist, can handle a tender ballad or an uptempo song with appropriate amounts of intensity, and isn't afraid to laugh, especially at himself.

That's not true....Willie was a Music Row insider/songwriter for years before he hit it big as a singer. Waylon's first hit records in the late 60s were produced by Chet Atkins. Johnny started on Sun Records but he became a legend on Columbia, one of Nashville's biggest and most prominent labels. As for Hank, his main benefactor was Fred Rose, the city's biggest publishing icon. All of these guys had "outlaw" status applied to them well after they became established.

Now, the two guys who did become superstars without bases of power in Nashville were the Bakersfield boys, Buck Owens and Merle Haggard. They truly did it their own way.